Somebody at Warner Brothers actually, finally got a clue. Now I'm not going to say that me ragging on their International Release Policies in a random post seen by barely 50 people had any sort of effect on one of the largest producers and distributors of entertainment media in the world, but I also don't believe in coincidences. OK, that's not true; I firmly believe in coincidence, if only to take the edge of the ludicrous amount of times I hear the phrase "everything happens for a reason" which is the type of horse-shit that seems to have enfeebled half the Global population. What you're really saying is that if there is some sort of higher power governing the lives of however many billion humans there are right now, then the shitty thing that just happened to you is either pre-ordained (which means your God hates you), or it's some sort of spiritual retribution for a previous transgression, (in which case your God still hates you). Failing that, you could always try embracing the notion that shit things happen to people all day everyday and whinging about gets you nowhere other than maybe shouting into the void in a weekly blog about shit movies which is probably just a thinly veiled allegory for your general malaise and overall hopelessness and if you only lightened up once in a while everything might look less shitty.
What I mean to say of course is that they finally released Mortal Kombat in the UK and after a not insignificant amount of fucking about (fix your movie streaming service YouTube, you turds), I managed to watch it.
I've had plenty of time to avoid spoilers and see reviews (managed the former, didn't really bother with the latter) and the general critical response seemed to be actually quite decent, superficially at least. Some even heralded it as the Best Video Game Adaptation yet (although that's an award on par with being given a trophy for "Most sweetcorn in a Single Turd" in a room full of people who are allergic to sweetcorn). Fan response has been less enthusiastic it would appear and having seen it, I can tell why.
Let's give some credit where it's due: trying to craft an original, creative and engaging story on the premise that a series of increasingly outlandish individuals take turns smashing each other's brains in is nigh on impossible. As a game, that's proven to be more than fruitful and as the years have gone by, the franchise has gone fully cinematic to the point where if you wanted to adapt the actual story from the last game, you'd need a 22 part series on HBO Max and a script so heavy in exposition it could be used to bludgeon a stampeding rhino. Not great for newbies, probably not that great for WB bank balances. What Studio Execs need is snappy, two hour chunks of digestible tripe they can sell for £15 a pop through YouTube and sit back while the cash rolls in; what that means is we're left with scriptwriters desperately fumbling around on their keyboards trying to come up with various ways they can segue between fight scenes and the end result is predictable at best. I do feel sorry for them in a way because being lumped with this Herculean task is a heavy burden indeed.
Part two of the problem is that by now there are so many characters that have appeared in the game, you couldn't possibly include them all. There are something like 30 original characters in the last game alone (not including celebrity cameos like Rambo, Robocop and The Terminator) and there are countless more who never made it out of the preceding entry in the series. Fans have their favourites of course, but who do you include? Even when you've picked your fighters, the whole idea of Mortal Kombat is to brutalise and subsequently murder your opponent in as gruesome fashion as possible. Makes it tricky to appear in the sequel if you've had your skull smushed into tiny bite-sized pieces. I'll probably come back to that, but my point is; writing this script is somewhat of a poisoned chalice.
This is where my magnanimity runs out sadly, because they've gone with probably the most terribly clichéd stuff they could and just run with it; and just like a small kid running with scissors, it's bound to end badly.
Again, credit where it's due, the start is pretty strong. Decent fight choreography, used some moves from the game, sets up the rivalry fans know and love between Sub Zero and Scorpion, looks like they might have avoided the curse of "This is Just Bloodsport with Sillier Costumes". Then, in a dramatic deviation from sense, reason and logic, we get introduced to a brand new character, not previously linked to or featured in any game. You have a roster big enough to make 16-bit game developers in the 90s blush and you just make some guy up? I would probably be less mad at it if: one; he had any charisma what-so-ever and two; he wasn't set up as "The Chosen One" so clumsily and obviously that you know exactly what's going to happen from the first moment you see him. Not only that, but they do it with one of those title card deals which literally spells it out to you. Soon enough, Jax comes to find him because of his odd dragon-shaped birthmark and away we go... sort of.
The biggest part of this movie, you'd have thought, would be the fights. It's one of the Big Three Fighting games, so surely that would translate over right? Well, yes and no, but mostly no. Everything is sort of nearly right: there are some moves from the games, but the overall choreography is just underwhelming. Weird choices have been made across the board; Reptile's design is ok, but not really like the game. Kabal's design is bang on, but his fights are just dull non-events. Goro is a bit plastic-looking, but considering he's notoriously overpowered in his game debut as a Boss, spoiler alert: not so much here. The focus was clearly on the fatalities and making them as good or better than the games. Kung Lao's hat, Lui Kang's Dragon, Sonya's wrist lasers, Sub Zero's arm break; they're all here and rendered in wonderfully crisp definition but at what cost? I'm not going to spoil who survives and who doesn't but it's never a surprise and some of these so-called tough guys go out really, really easily. Let's be honest, the state of videogame graphics nowadays means if you just want to see the fatalities, you can pop onto YouTube and watch every single one of them in less time and at less cost than forking out for two hours of this. The biggest irony is that with all the low level skullduggery, training montages and earning of super powers, they never actually even start the tournament. Shang Tsung makes a big deal about cheating and taking out the Earth Realm fighters before Mortal Kombat (The Tournament) begins. His counterpart, Raiden doesn't really do anything about it even when he finds that out, despite being an Elder God and sort of in charge of making sure nobody breaks the rules. The Mario Yamasaki of Interdimensional Fight Tournaments if you will (it's kind of a niche reference, Google is your friend here). Eventually the two sets of champions just sort of flit about killing each other off randomly, and then the final fight happens and it's kind of all over. Disappointality.
Between fights isn't really a lot better. The dialogue is fairly non-descript and punctuated with horrible cringe-quotes from the games. Kung Lao announcing his Flawless Victory is just teeth-jarring. In fact everybody introduces themselves like the character select screen and it's just bad. "I am not Bi Han. I'm Sub Zero" says the nominal main antagonist as he's talking to Shang Tsung, the boss of all bosses, an ancient sorcerer who has presumably had Sub Zero working for him for centuries by this point. This isn't the icebreaker (pun intended) at a new employee seminar, he and pretty much everyone knows the god-damned ice dude from Mortal Kombat is Sub Zero. It's odd. There is at least one saving grace however and that's Kano. I feel like they might have allowed him to improvise his lines a bit more than the rest of the cast and the result is a realistically foul-mouthed Ozzie with some decent one liners. His arc is no real surprise, particularly if you've played any of the games, but he is at least fun and clearly enjoying himself. I particularly enjoyed him calling the wet lettuce main character Cole a "fucking idiot", mostly because it's the most accurate character description I've ever seen. Don't even ask why the exclusively Japanese speaking Hanso randomly changes his name to Scorpion while in hell for no apparent reason other than he just does and then quotes the infamous "Get Over Here!" line from the game in perfect, unbroken, unaccented English before delivering all of his remaining lines in his native language to people who clearly don't speak Japanese. Nonsensality.
So here's the thing: Nostalgia tells us that Mortal Kombat from 1995 starring Christopher Lambert was great and we loved it. Re-watching said 25 year old movie tells us it's not actually that great, but nostalgia is a hell of a drug, so it gets a pass and we still love it, if only for the admittedly dated theme tune (which is still a banger). This new effort is, for all intents and purposes the exact same movie. Earth heroes go to Outworld, fights ensue, invasion is averted. The fights in 2021 are better (just), the design is better, the graphics are better, but the acting is comparably terrible and ultimately there's nothing remotely new or interesting going on here. It's kind of a waste and a shame; they monkeyed around with MK lore, slapped a bunch of unmemorable fights together, rubbed generous amounts of computer generated blood over everything and hoped it'd come out as a fully fledged cinematic experience. Sadly, they sort of missed the mark.
I know I just spent the last few paragraphs dragging this movie's carcass across broken glass and jamming it's own severed head into its abdominal cavity, but honestly I can't say I didn't enjoy it on some weird level. It was distracting enough and I guess when you watch as much crap Sci-Fi as I do then stuff like this is like a holiday.
Thanks for being here folks, it's gratifying to know I put a smile, grimace or puzzled look on a few people's faces every week.
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